Pickles & Dimes

Faithful followers of Traffic Elimination Center® tutorials may recognize this intersection, as it was previously spotlighted in Volume 1. I have since moved away from this intersection (moved away = three blocks), yet it still plagues me and therefore deserves multiple tutorials.

Illustration 1 (drawn to scale): Same setup as before – three lanes enter, two lanes leave!

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Today I had Spaghettio’s® Sliced Franks for lunch. Because I am lazy. And also, apparently nine years old.

Actually, it’s almost grocery shopping time and the lunchmeat in the fridge is looking very suspicious. Like “just-killed-the-oranges-in-the-back-and-stuffed-them-behind-the-water-bottles” suspicious.

But mostly, I ate them because I’m lazy.

Anyway, when we bought the Spaghettio’s Sliced Franks, we were dismayed to see that the grocery store didn’t have the regular spaghettio’s. There was some kind of cartoon figure shaped into pasta sitting happily among the sliced pseudo-pork parts.

Now while eating regular Spaghettio’s as a 32-year old is mildly sad, eating Jimmy Neutron Spaghettio’s is just LAME.

So hey, Campbell’s: why don’t you acknowledge that your target market also includes people who are old enough to drive, vote, and have a retirement account, and introduce some new shapes that might make us feel less guilty about hiding the cans in our cart underneath the skinless chicken breasts and whole-grain rice?

(Not that I eat whole-grain rice. I’m a Chicken-Flavored Rice-a-Roni® gal myself. I eat it with the skinless boneless breasts. I’m all health, all the time.)

I’ll even get you started with some shapes to consider:

- Playboy bunny silhouettes
- Sports team logos
- Diamond rings
- Band logos
- Dollar signs
- Company logos
- “24″ characters

The list goes on and on. Let’s all stop pretending that the eating of juvenile food doesn’t exist among adults, and let’s make some money!

Let me know if you need any more assistance. I’ll be over here, eating some SpongeBob® fruit snacks.

It’s election time again, and well, something near and dear to me is campaigning pretty hard. Its nickname is Big Z, which stands for Big Zit, because it’s not just one little zit, it’s like five zits in one and its party headquarters are on my chin. It’s been going door to door and irritating me with mudslinging commercials denouncing its opponent, Clear Skin, and it’s like, “blah blah blah, I’m Big Z and I approve this message.” And I’m telling it, “NO. I am not voting for you. You not only break promises; you make me BREAK OUT at inopportune moments.” And then it laughs and raises my taxes.

I’m so voting Independent this time. I hear good things about their candidate Clearasil.

Every once in awhile someone will ask me, “Why do you like baseball?” And I usually just shrug and say, “I dunno. I just do.”

But then the 2006 Minnesota Twins came along and now if someone were to ask me, “Why do you love baseball?” well, I think I just might have an answer.

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